"In Renaissance Italy, the Galenic remedy theriac became a focus of political and market power. The State Drug examines princes who secured support by regulating theriac and apothecaries who competed to brand their own recipes. So popular that it became ungovernable, theriac is a window into the...

The paper proposes a general conceptual framework for state fragility that aims to disentangle the identification of fragility from its underlying drivers. It reduces the identification state fragility to the responsiveness of its economic or political systems to shocks. In an extension of...